The seven cities faced an intractable set of problems by the 1980s: declining economies, shrinking populations, loss of investment, decay and demoralisation. It was unclear how new ways out of such acute problems would emerge. The mismatch between what former industrial cities could offer and the requirements of the new economy, made starker by the obvious gaps between old industrial cities like the seven in this study and the blossoming economies of more knowledge and service-based cities, was extreme. Rapid economic changes far beyond the cities and their social impacts on the cities themselves changed the political dynamics of the cities and of whole countries. Many wider structures began to shift.

In the countries where the seven cities were, these shifts took on concrete new forms. Both Italy and France devolved considerable power to regional governments and to city mayors in the 1980s and 1990s. Spain became a democracy after 40 years of dictatorship in the late 1970s. In 1990, Germany underwent a huge political and economic transformation with the reunification of its two divided parts, making it by far the largest and most powerful country in Europe. The UK in the 1980s moved from its heavily state-run, state-subsidised and state-owned economic structures towards a radical and confrontational privatisation of many previously public forms of ownership and production. The EU was expanding, and, in the late 1980s, Soviet domination of eastern Europe disintegrated, opening the door to new forms of growth and the transformation of Europe itself.

Such was the scale of the changes underway that it gave new political direction to national and local governments across Europe, throwing up new leadership in cities in the search for a new economic rationale, and new ways to fit within the changing environment. The major challenges for the seven cities were to:

• • stop the haemorrhage of people and jobs

• • create new functions for post-industrial cities

• • attract new resources and new players

• • retain the most skilled people and build new skills in an increasingly redundant workforce

• • remodel the expensive infrastructure of the cities.

Each city had its own turning points, driven by particular events, but the political change of direction was in every city underpinned by the clear need to do things differently. An important unifying event, such as the election of a visionary mayor, willing to break with tradition, began the turnaround in Torino and Saint-Étienne.